Food is Not Technically a Scarce Good in the U.S.
In a country where $1 hot dogs line city blocks and a “salad” is often a $6 box of limp lettuce and stale croutons, it is easy to disregard the movement for locally-sourced, healthy food as an elitist luxury. However, the lack of affordable healthy food options in America is a product of a profit-driven food system, and the movement for locally-farmed food could actually be its solution.
Food is not technically a scarce good in the U.S.—it is heavily overproduced, and over a third of it is wasted annually. In Massachusetts, despite this and a decline in unemployment, over a quarter million households (12% of the state’s population) continue to face food insecurity. Nutrients fail to make it to our tables because food is not a right, it is a commodity. Corporate agriculture overproduces cash crops at low prices, which are then sold to the highest bidders rather than the people going hungry in communities across America. 40% of the corn grown in the US is sold to biofuel industries, 36% is used as animal feed, and much of the remainder is transformed into synthetic “foods” like the high-fructose corn syrup that makes unhealthy food cheap, convenient, and addictive. While 54% of U.S.’ land is farmland, only 4% grows the food we directly consume(1).
Big Agriculture Carries Big Environmental Impact
Crops like corn and soy are grown without rotation, on the same land year after year—a practice called “monocropping”— where heavy machinery and the lack of biodiversity and nutrient cycling leads to soil erosion (requiring more synthetic fertilizer), pest infestation (requiring more pesticides), and groundwater pollution. To add insult to environmental injury, food requires extra packaging and refrigeration in order to be shipped around the country, not to mention the carbon footprint of that transportation(2). Your food choices can also affect your personal carbon footprint—trading a serving of chicken or pork for beans once a week is equivalent to not burning 7 gallons of gas, while foregoing beef once a week saves the equivalent of 38 gallons.
Fortunately, we can take protecting our health and environment into our own hands by supporting local food production. Currently, 90% of the food New Englanders consume is imported. But here’s some good news—even taking into account the region’s short growing season and limited soil fertility, we can still produce up to ⅔ of our own food by expanding agricultural land use to just 15% of our land. In 2012, while 54% of U.S. land was farmland, Massachusetts was only utilizing 7.7% (including pastures).
Your Food Budget Can Support a Change
We can incentivize farmers to expand their land if we buy our groceries directly from them instead of buying from retailers. Do you realize where most of our money goes when we buy food from large retailers? Roughly 80 cents of every dollar we spend goes to marketing, processing, wholesaling, distribution, and retailing, and only 11 cents make it back to the farmer. If each household diverted just $20 of their monthly food budget to one of the 2,200 Massachusetts farms that sell at farm stands and farmers’ markets or are are community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, we would generate $235 million in local income for the state and create almost 4,000 new jobs.
Worried about prices? Don’t be! Local food, which eliminates the expenses of agribusiness inputs and middlemen that sell food to consumers, can be just as affordable as grocery store produce. An August 2018 survey by the Massachusetts Food System Collaborative found that prices for seasonal produce like cabbage, leaf lettuce, romaine, cauliflower, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, chard, peaches, strawberries, blueberries, basil, and mint were cheaper at farmers’ markets than at Massachusetts grocery stores. SNAP/EBT benefits are also accepted at many farms and farmers’ markets across the state. On top of that, unlike national agribusiness giants, Massachusetts farmers own and operate small farms that are far more varied in what they produce, and they tend to the land in a way that is more attentive and sustainable over the long term.
We Can Even Eat Local in the City
Thankfully, eating locally is not limited to the few Massachusetts residents who can see greenery and farmland from their houses. Boston’s expanded zoning laws have allowed innovative businesses like Freight Farms to promote compact, self-sustaining agriculture in urban areas. Freight Farms sells 40-foot-tall solar-powered containers that house an entire farming cycle’s worth of equipment and can be squeezed between buildings or under overpasses. Their customers have started small businesses, like Corner Stalk Farm, selling their produce at the Boston Public Market and various farmers’ markets in the area. Similar companies like FreshBox in Mills, MA are growing as much as 19 acres of produce in one 320-square-foot hydroponics-equipped shipping container, which contributes to the quarter ton of produce the FreshBox “farm” grows every day. And while hydroponically grown organics are indeed better for human health, they are still second to soil-grown organics when it comes to supporting a healthy planet. You may check out TheFoodProject.org or UrbanFarmingInstitute.org to learn more in this area.
In the city’s South End, Boston Microgreens has been growing seasonal fruits, vegetables, and fresh microgreens out of an apartment–turned–greenhouse and selling them to home cooks and chefs from 30 Boston restaurants for the last year. In response to skyrocketing demand for for their herbicide and pesticide-free produce, the 2 northeastern graduates who own and operate it are already looking to move their operations to a bigger location.
Supporting Massachusetts’ Growing Local Food Economy
The future of local food in Massachusetts is more than promising. In Holyoke, a poor city facing crippling economic odds, a small group of former farmers and gardeners from Puerto Rico managed to transform a small community garden into a thriving community network known as “Nuestras Raíces.” Building on rich traditions that connected their homeland, culture, and community to the earth, they have developed programming that serves 125 families in youth development, job training, women’s leadership, commercial farming and tourism, economic development (restaurant, bakery, farmers market, community kitchen), and community education. Nuestras Raices should serve as an inspiration us that producing ⅔ of our own food is not inconceivable. Food is more than mere sustenance—it connects us to people, and it connects us to the land, and getting involved is as easy as locating the farms nearest to you. This tool from the state's website can help you find them. Another place to check for farms near you is this helpful tool at TheOrganicFoodGuide.org. Enjoy!
(1) Shiva, Vandana. Who Really Feeds the World? Zed Books Ltd, 2015.
(2) Magdoff, Fred, and Brian Tokar. Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal. Monthly Review Press, 2010.
- Sonali Deshpande is a Massachusetts Sierra Club volunteer, former intern, and an economics major at Vassar College